Hey, Minnie. Thanks for having me.
Well, so much to talk about –
First, where we're recording this podcast. Because that's first and foremost really cool.
Yeah. Thanks for coming to Pasadena.
We’re recording in a treehouse/ADU/trailer in the woods. This is like probably the coolest part of my week.
I’m glad you didn’t say, we’re recording in like a Minnie's trailer park in her backyard, which is also true. Yeah, I appreciate you being a little flexible on this. So you're in LA is kind of where we're going with this statement. Only as of how long?
I am. So you know, grew up in Northern California, spent the bulk of my childhood in the Bay Area. Spent 11 years in New York.Absolutely love New York, but kind of missed, you know, California. moved to L. A. about a year ago.
Right, and I’ve been trying to have you on the podcast for the past year, so that makes sense. So, explain Everywhere Ventures and the fund, because you were doing the fund before, I'm an investor in the fund, so I want to, you know, hear a little bit about that.
Had different observations about what was missing, in the New York ecosystem. And part of that was driven by Jenny running Techstars New York for a number of years and seeing the struggle to raise that first 500, 000 to a million from smart money.
And so we thought What we could do is build sort of the top soil of the New York ecosystem by bringing together 50 founders and operators, pooling that capital
So we would have all the. smarts of an angel network, but all the decision making laser focus of a fund and that we could sort of scale up that topsoil that existed in places like the Bay Area and other ecosystems. But, you know, six, seven years ago, didn't exist as fully as it, does now in the New York ecosystem.
We call it community driven venture capital, where we basically have about as many LPs who are founders as we have portfolio companies And what we do to support our portfolio is not so much hamstrung by Jenny and I spending all of our time supporting portfolio, but more air traffic controlling the amazing founders who are LPs of ours with the portfolio companies that might need a specific.
Form of help. And so that was kind of phase one. And then as COVID happens, and We started to feel the tug from a deal flow standpoint.
So phase two was really us launching the fund in about 10 select ecosystems around the world. And then earlier this year, we changed the name to be everywhere ventures going.
And so, Does the Fund LA, let's pick on that does it still exist? Are you guys still working with those portfolio companies?
Absolutely. So the fund now has about 250 portfolio companies, about 500 LPs who are founders and operators. You know, 50 of whom are based here in LA, 50 of whom are based in Australia India, so around the world.
And so now, you know, what's really interesting about this is this global community can support not only the founders in LA, but those in New York and those around the world.
And so, you know, what we're starting to see now are these interesting ways that we can look at the data and cut across the portfolio to see what trends might be happening in Asia that could be ported over to portfolio companies to help them, you know, as they scale in the U S and vice versa.
Yeah, you know, I think so. I just got back from Southeast Asia. and
you know, through COVID we've started to see the adoption of restaurant ordering and QR codes, things that have long existed in Asia.
You know, those were prevalent and [00:04:00] prominent five years ago, yet we only figured them out, you know, last year. And so there's a lot of things like that live stream e commerce live stream video where tipping and sort of engagement with in the consumer space where you might have a live stream artist that's effectively doing a show and digitally busking and receiving tips.
we tend to think of tips in sort of a, only fans context or something like that, where it's literally giving money to one person, but what Asia is really unpacked is. Digital gifting in the form of micro credits and micro gifting that are actually enhancements of the engagement with that artist that enable them to also monetize.
so, so in this example, it's not just like directly tipping the artist, but it's micro tipping or it's micro
Imagine you have 20 or 50 digital gifts that are related to that culture, related to they're just basically fun animations that might overlay. So you're speaking digitally on a. live stream and I can sort of put a crown on your head that says hey [00:05:00] Minnie's the queen of the hour, you know, and it pops up and you can see that digital kind of augmented reality in the screen And you say oh, that's funny.
That's cute And by the way, I just made 50 cents because that person gave me this crown that enables you to kind of engage with me directly. So it's almost like the tv is talking back to you So imagine watching a show where you can pay a different amount of money to put a digital item on the guest on the show and they can in turn respond to you.
They can in turn engage directly with you and say, Oh my gosh, Minnie, thanks for the crown. And that that's a way of monetizing the content, but it's also just a form of it. It's not an adversarial form of ad monetization. It's actually an embedded form of Entertainment enhancement
So, it's sort of related to mining the data and understanding it all, is what you said about playing like air traffic control. Like, how have you found the ability to scale a network this large
so interesting because I look back. So I started in venture capital 12 years ago at a fund on Sand Hill and that fund was called more David Alventures. It was a kind of a series, a [00:06:00] series B fund. And you know, then sort of went into more angel investing and then I got together with Jenny five or six years ago.
And looking back, you know, one of the things that I used to talk to our managing partner about was All of the other things on his plate that I didn't really have insight into in the amount of time that he spent fundraising handholding LPs, talking to portfolio companies, fighting fires, running internal operations, doing tax audits, all sorts of other things.
And, you know, as you imagine with a 2 billion funds and at a very, very baby level. You know, those are some of the things that we're starting to experience running everywhere ventures in the sense that, you know, we probably spend a third of our time sourcing new companies, looking at new deals, a third of our time supporting portfolio companies, and then, you know, maybe as much as a third of our time, just managing a venture fund, which includes, you know, outbound fundraising and creating all the internal systems to keep track of things.

And so we really use Airtable to create Systems of record where we can use, you know, air table forms to [00:07:00] bring in sort of, Hey, what's your expertise across the portfolio and across sort of our LP base where we have, you know, 500 people have basically answered a survey saying. Here's one thing that I really know well, and I'm willing to answer questions on this one thing.
So we have, you know, over the last five, six years, we've been able to accrue these data sets
But it's completely a work in progress, you know, as, as, you know, running one of these funds yourself. I mean, it's kind of a game of whack a mole of which thing is broken and what do we fix
Mm hmm.
ReturnMates, uh, I think is... interesting about the different geographies and maybe I'll start by like LA versus New York is a good, you were in New York for a decade now you're in LA. Do you feel it quite differently?
It's such a good question and not one that I feel like I have a fully, stock answer for you know, the reason i've spent most of my career actually outside of the bay area is I think sometimes when you're not playing on your home court, you tend to outshine in some sense, like it's better to be away from where you [00:08:00] feel most at home to kind of put yourself in a, out of your comfort zone and in a place where maybe you, you have to be more entrepreneurial or you have to hustle more.
I actually don't know that I would have been as entrepreneurial if I had just stayed in the Bay Area. I feel like there were too many things that just from home base where I'd grown up in Palo Alto, I'd gone to high school, you know, middle school, elementary school in Stanford, been at Google, been at Facebook, kind of been in the eye of the storm and been on Sand Hill Road.
And so there was just kind of too much of a an ecosystem that would have been a safety net. I think that sometimes getting away from the eye of the storm can kind of Give you more ability to look back and critique and actually add value
It's interesting. And so would you say your book was kind of that same look back and critique of silicon valley
Yeah, so the book that I wrote was, you know, interesting because When we see startups, we tend to see, you know, the output, the result of where the startup gets to after they pivot five times. Whereas when you write a book, it's truly a time capsule and what you put down on the page Stays on the page and it [00:09:00] doesn't change.
And so when you write something I wrote the book in 2016 It came out in april of 2017 And the basic premise the sort of thesis of it was looking around silicon valley saying you know, despite the sort of drumbeat of stem and the fact that science technology engineering and math are Really front and center in today's world this, this human skills, the soft skills and especially as tech starts to erode certain parts of our jobs and tasks within our jobs we actually become more human, not less in order to have a comparative advantage against machines.
We have to be able to ask the right questions. We have to be able to push back and find bias and data or ask, how is the data collected? So all these skills that relate to the how and the why, Okay. Are really these big picture kind of critical thinking skills and communication and collaboration and creativity skills That how do you train for that?
And so as the whole world, uh, you know mark andreason and sandhill road and vinod kosal We're kind of saying if you're a philosophy major you're doomed in the future I was sort of looking beneath the hood and saying well [00:10:00] Actually, you know guys like chris dixon stewart butterfield. There's a number of Immensely talented people at the helm of a lot of these companies that actually have this big picture thinking they're technical enough to be dangerous.
But what they're really good at is asking the right questions. Have the charisma to be able to sell a vision, hire a team, manage people, And so the premise of the book was really in defense of. Holistic kind of critical thinking skills taught through the liberal arts and why this actually isn't going away This is actually a thing that's quite important
And so, um, that was really premise of the book, you know, and interesting to come out in 2017 when Ai was a thing but it wasn't as front and mainstream as it is today. And so to kind of see the book Go full circle.
I mean, the two things you said, asking the right questions and selling a vision. How do you get there?
How do you get there? In
mean, is it, is it studying philosophy and literature in college?
Or is it, a function, you know, our, our big tech companies need to invest in, or?
in?
One of the misnomers about college is, I think, just this it's a plane ticket to one place that's relevant or irrelevant. And people sort of think of it in terms of plane ticket, not a passport. And if you think of it in terms of, is your degree relevant or irrelevant? Did you study Comparative literature, computer science, which one's good, which one's bad.
It's a very black and white way of looking at education, whereas treating it as a passport where you say, okay, there's a lot of different experiences, a lot of different cultures, a lot of different places to travel. It's about sort of seeing the world and getting a holistic, fill out your passport with a bunch of stamps, and you should absolutely take that computer science class, but you might also.
Benefit from taking a class on Dostoevsky and just reading Russian literature from the, you know, 18th century, 19th century. So, there's sort of a How do we get there? I mean, I think just teaching curiosity and getting people to be authentic. Stuart Butterfield talks a lot about philosophy and the parallels that it has to entrepreneurship, which I think are quite interesting that, you know, I think if you have a very rote curriculum where you're [00:12:00] studying for the right answers all the time, it's very difficult when you get in the startup land where there are no right answers and you don't have.
Full clarity. You know, if you kind of come from a very rote and mechanical education and you go to maybe a consulting job where there's always a right answer that you need to get to prove to the client and then you get into startup land, I think you can really struggle to grapple with the gray areas of not having perfect information and having to make decisions under ambiguity.
And so, you know, Stuart talks a lot about that in the sense that philosophy There is really no right answer. You're grappling your way through the dark and you're getting closer and closer to these ideas of agreement or disagreement. But then you make a decision and you say, you know, what is it to lead a good life?
Okay. We could talk about that all afternoon and we might get closer and closer to some cool ideas. But there's not really one answer that's going to be right. And similar to entrepreneurship, you know, you're kind of iterating your way through the dark to get to this idea of product market fit or what your customer wants or what the company should do,
[00:13:00] And so I think there's a lot of parallels where if you study something that's broadly, you know, leads to critical thinking and evaluating these inputs Gaining comfort with ambiguity. those are interesting skills that again, don't have direct takeaways. You know, when you listen to somebody say, well, you know, I get that you study engineering and your job title is engineer.
You study philosophy and your job title is philosopher. Is that the only job you say? No, actually it could be ceo. It could be a hedge fund manager It could be a number of different things that require critical thinking. And in depth of kind of inquiry and similar to that, you know, I think when we talk about sales and vision, you know, the opening story of the book and something I talk about quite frequently is this ability to sell.
And if you think about the opening story of the book is about an actress who goes to Broadway and she says, you know, it's so interesting when you go to Broadway because 60 people show up to get the gig. Everyone gets the exact same words on the page. Yet one person gets the part and it's so similar to me when how many times have we heard the same pitch over and over again?
And you say okay what's different about [00:14:00] this time the way this delivery is happening It's kind of the same thing as an actress getting the page. And only one person getting the part
And there's all of these little details that again, kind of that difference of 60 people showing up reading the same scripts and one person landing the role on Broadway. Everyone can sort of say, Oh yeah, I auditioned for that part. I had the same idea. I pitched that startup five years ago, but yet one person really Created the company and I think of for venture capital a lot of it to me is much more psychology than It is finance, you know, it's really looking at early stage people early stage motivations.
Evaluating authenticity and grit and perseverance
And How do we get ahead of selecting for those characteristics? VC
Yeah, I often say that the thing that surprised me about VC was how much of it is sales. And I said this to someone and they're like, Oh. Like it was like I had said something like the stupidest thing they're like Minnie as you get senior in your career Everything is sales in every career and I was like, oh, okay you know Vcs are always selling but like yeah the actors the actresses they're selling.
So How do you get to some of those questions? Like do you have favorite questions?
One thing that we've found. So we always ask for pro rata rights, right? And so as a small funds, we always sort of ask for the legal documentation that we can invest in the future
rata rata
no, this is a very tactical question. but I would say, you know, more than we care about the actually signing on the dotted line of getting pro rata rightsReally, I think.
It to us is a litmus test of how is this person going to navigate conflict or how are they going to navigate a tough So typically we're a smaller check than a lot of people on the cap table The founder that comes back with the knee jerk reaction of hey, my lawyer says only 500, 000 and above get pro rata rights.
Sorry Charlie. You're out of luck. We sort of say well, you know, is that really the answer? Could we debate this? Can we talk about this? Could you get on the phone with us? And again, if they sort of black and white answer No way, that to us more so than not getting pro rata. It's the litmus test of how this founder is gonna deal with
Us as a partner, right?
No, I mean, if someone said like, I wish I could negotiate the term sheet before I'm negotiating the term sheet.
Anything else that you're trying to sort of suss out? You said, you know, you try and get all these more fuzzy skills, I guess.
you know, one line of questioning that I think we try to do sometimes is this test for adaptability. And so Seeing kind of these hypothetical questions
And I think trying to push those points with founders where, hey, let's say level one and level two don't work. What's level three, whether it's the code you use, whether it's who you hire, whether it's that go to market doesn't work.
And those are kind of the questions of if they literally come back and say, well, that's not going to happen, or we wouldn't do that, or they just, you know, are met with complete obstinance, then that to me is not an adaptable founder. And the other litmus test we use is we call it fast founders or slow founders. And it really comes down to speed of execution and not letting small things get in the way. So, for example, [00:17:00] when somebody is dragging their feet because you know, again, lawyer said this, and we have these 17 steps we have to go through Um, that provides a yellow flag to us that if this person can't sort of cut to the chase, cut through the noise and figure out what's really relevant and how do we do this faster that is a slow founder and we may walk away from the deal versus a fast founder is somebody that's kind of plowing through tasks and plowing through your stuff.
focusing on what's clearly important and leaving some of the other stuff to the side. And we've just seen repeatedly over the course of, you know, close to 300 investments , over six years. Just that this litmus test of fast founder versus slow founder because there's always a there's always sort of quicksand, there's quicksand everywhere in the startup world, right?
And if you kind of get stuck in the quicksand every single time, and that leads to whether it's, Hey, my And then if it takes two months to kind of replace them and let them go. And then when they get let go, there's a number of knock on effects or the person that says didn't work, I fired them on [00:18:00] Friday.
I found this new person over the weekend. They're here on Monday, right? That's the difference of a fast founder and a slow founder. And, you know, we just see repeatedly that that ability not to get stuck in quicksand is the difference of running out of runway, running at, you know, your burns too high and you run off the cliff.
And Or you're able to kind of get the right traction and you're able to close the next round.
So, how international are you guys?
So we're
predominantly
two questions
Yeah, predominantly, you know u. s. But we do invest globally. So we really are truly everywhere
Because I think like there's lots of people who just study, like decision making, right? And there's certain cultures where they're, you know, notably slower, but it's like, you know, they're slow, slow, slow, but then everyone commits and they don't revisit a decision. And like, I wonder whether what you're talking about in terms of the fast movers you know, plays much better in certain cultures.
It's possible, yeah. It's, it's an interesting question. we tend to see that founders across the world are quite similar more than they're different. And this comes down even to like, people say, wow, you guys invest everywhere. That must be wildly crazy to, you know, have all these deals all over the planet.
And we say, well, actually, you know, most of them are Delaware. Most of South American deals are, are came in. Most of Southeast Asian deals are Singapore. They kind of all are domiciled in the same way shape or form They typically all use the same instruments, you know convertible notes and safes they typically all have more in common than they do apart and similarly, you know from a founder standpoint A lot of these founders are reading the same documentation.
A lot of them are going to you know, kind of premiere. Accelerators usually after we invest in them. So we're not going to demo days, but we're typically
And similarly, you accelerators usually
Yeah. So, I mean, the whole premise, the joke that we make internally is that we try to find out about companies before Delaware.
about 99 percent of our deal flow, not exaggerating, has come from the founder network. so we're typically, you know investing in the first institutional round generally in the 750, 000 to about 2 million is kind of the strike zone of where we typically invest between 50 and 250, 000.
And as far as, you know, stages, we're primarily focused on the future of money, health, and work, which we call the table stakes economy,
So do you have like a certain valuation where you stop investing?
We've,
know what companies to send your way.
Yeah, I mean, we, we baked into our LPA for a long time, a hard cap of 10 million, as a valuation cap. And it really kept us honest through the boom times of 20 19, 20, 21, 22 even where we really, you know, we missed on some deals that were, of course, second, third time founder pricing at 25 valuation on a seed round.
You know, we weren't participating in that, but, it's proven to be, you know, valuable now look, looking back.
and it's the second money in and you know, partnerships are one of the hardest things in the world. Um, and I think,
Yeah, it's really a fascinating thing because, you know, partnerships are one of the hardest things in the world.[00:21:00] And I think, we've all worked with many different people in our lives and, uh, Jenny is truly a force of nature.
So I'd say, you know, personality wise, I'm probably more mild mannered and behind the scenes. Jenny's more the front of house force of nature, certainly on Twitter than me. I'm sort of more long form. She's more short form. She's more East coast. I'm more West coast. I think, you know, what's interesting too about how we make decisions on deals is we're really conviction led, not consensus led.
And you know, and the other thing that's an interesting observation is I think as i've been in venture, you know a number of years I'd say at the early days the ability to tell between no and maybe was like a 50 50 bet, the first bit of venture you're kind of talking to 100 companies and 50 of them Are nos and 50 of them are kind of interesting
and 50 know the no's. of no
And then as you kind of get more refined The level of no goes higher and higher and higher where you're spending more of your time on 10 of the companies that are maybes 90 of them are basically knows.
And I think what's interesting about spending your time on those 10 maybes sometimes, between Jenny and I, I get faster toward the finish line. I'm like the hair. And she's the tortoise. And we end up with the same answer generally, but sometimes I fast forward to two inches from the finish line.
And I say, Hey, you know, I did all this homework and here I'm, right at the finish line. I want to do it. And she says, well, wait a minute, let's go through these other nine steps. And so we'll kind of end up with the same answer, but sometimes we'll get there at different times
So how do you get that no number up to, as you said, from 50 percent to 90%? Cause I think that is a good investor should be doing that. Do you think it's like theses or just areas or is it founders
Yeah, I think, that the cutdowns for me, you know, one getting really focused on stage and getting really focused on valuation, obviously that cuts a lot of things away.
And then, you know, over the course of a long time, you, kind of find, You know, repeatable patterns of businesses that are maybe interesting in the abstract, but they're not interesting to you. Right? So for example, marketplaces are wonderful businesses in the abstract, I'd say to me personally they're not the first thing that jumps off the page to me cause I've seen just how difficult they are in two sided marketplaces.
You know, I think there's certain business models that start to repeatedly play over and over that you say, well, okay, net, net, according to all the things that I see, this is one that's just a little bit less interesting to me.
And so getting that kind of internal honesty with what you want to spend your time
Mm
No, I mean, I think it's interesting.
are there other business models that you've just learned are not, are less attractive?
Certainly, you know, the irony is some of the biggest exits I've had have been in consumer yet. It's not a category that I seek out. And so what's interesting too, about the way we make decisions is that we have kind of a core focus, right? Which is this future of money, health and work. But sometimes the things that fall outside of the core thesis that you're still passionate about and you still want to do.
So, Actually, the burden of proof to do those deals is higher. And so the conviction is higher. And sometimes you should actually do those deals because there's a greater sort of burden of proof where you say, I know we don't do this, but I still want to do it anyway.
And so interestingly, you know, some of our biggest outlier companies in fund one are actually consumer bets, you know, that were sort of a little bit outside of what we did and in speaking with other funds.
It's funny because I spoke to a Scandinavian fund recently that says, you know, we want to do more in the U. S. And I said, well, you guys do anything in Latin America? And they said, no, we never do anything in Latin America, except for we've done two things and they're both
unicorns.
But sometimes it's that extra weirdness
Yeah, that life, it's all the extra weirdness. So I listed some extracurriculars. What are some things, if we can move into you
Yeah, you know, it's, I had a mentor back, you know, a decade plus ago, two, two decades ago, maybe. And he said so many people struggle to have any interests. If you have more than one, [00:25:00] make sure to kind of keep them all open at the same time and don't feel this need to.
Focus and compartmentalize just because everyone else is doing it. So if you have two or three or four things you're passionate about, try to put those things together. And I actually think, you know, looking back on my, my life and just a real interest in international relations and interest in economic development,
So, you know, the Council on Foreign Relations and experiences that I had at the White House were all kind of these different attempts to find impact and kind of put these two sides of the coin together. And just been kind of a commonality through the course of my career, but I think, you know, there's a lot of interesting things that come out of these intersections and back to the book.
There's a really cool example that I learned about after writing the book, which is people put odd combinations together. Sometimes that's really what leads to innovation. And so, you know, one woman that met through the course of speaking about the book is this woman, Katie Kwan, and Katie was a ballerina.
And she basically had done ballet at the Met in New York, and she also loved robotics. And people said, those are two [00:26:00] impossible things to put together. You know, you're either a ballerina or you're a roboticist and a mechanical engineer. And she said, no, no, these two things go together. And what Katie was able to do was get a Ph. D. in Robotics. And now she created a whole field of study called Choreo Robotics, which is focused on ballet choreography mixed with mechanical engineering and robotics to create more trust and more graceful maneuvers
and it's this really fascinating implementation of these two things that she loved. This kind of Venn diagram that's not supposed to intersect, but she figured out this one thing that could go together.
And I think those sorts of weird, to your point of like, life happens at these weird intersections. I think, you know, that's authenticity, right? It's putting together these weird combinations of things that you're uniquely poised to do and hopefully give you.
You know, an N of one, as far as who does
interesting. interesting. Oh, that's, that's really well said. Yeah, I know. I think there was, I, I've quoted this, I think on the podcast that there is a study on innovation or innovative people. But it was innovative people or innovation comes from two things and.
One is being very prolific, so just, if you do a lot, like, sometimes it's going to be innovative. And two is at the intersection, when you're combining robots and ballet or, you know, Asian food and American food or something. It's those intersections. So more on you, Scott. what adjectives do your friends use to describe you?
I'd say loyal is probably one. And I think my move back to L. A. has reminded me of how I self identified for so many years of my life, which was More as an athlete than anything else.
Um In new york I kind of lost touch with that in some sense.
What was your sport of choice? Did you play at Stanford?
I played high school soccer. I played on the jv team in college Uh, so kind of the second team and was always a runner so done a bunch of marathons Uh did track and cross country kind of all through growing up and then uh some ironman kind of triathlons ironman?
the independent
what about just sort of like the looking back, like, advice you'd give to younger [00:28:00] self or advice you find yourself giving to entrepreneurs?
I think, Something that one of my friends told me a long time ago, we were standing in front of a map in his, his apartment and the map had all these pins in it around the world. And he said, don't worry, we're going to get to all those places.
And it was a really profound statement because everyone always says, hey, life's short, you know, live it up, do this, do that. And he was saying, no, no, no, life is long. And I think the way I internalize that is relationships are long and people come around again and again in your life. For better and worse, right?
So it's great to have Really good relationships with people because chances are you're going to see them again every door that you crack open today You don't know what it's going to lead to five ten twenty years from now And so crack open as many doors as you can and always give it forward and always be genuine as Helpful as you can.
And so I think that's something my younger self was conscious of but my older self is really reflective of that Hey, thank god. I was really nice to those people back in 2012 because They've actually come back around a decade later and said, I remember that specific meeting and what drink I had in your Sandhill Road conference room.
And I remember I was having a bad day and you were the nicest VC that I met. And so there's some element of that person coming back 10 years later that's leading to, you know, potential dividends. Not just financially, but just personally, that just makes me feel good. It's a great note to end on, Scott. I feel like few investors really have as much breadth as you do, and I think it gives you a really unique and global perspective, and really appreciate you coming on the show